When do I use en?

As a rough guide, en placed before the verb means 'of it' or 'of them'.
On this page, we look at some examples of how exactly the word en is used
in French.

Different uses of en

Use with numbers and quantities

A common use of en is with a number or quantity. Note that in such
cases, its common to omit the 'of it/them' in English. But in French, en is
generally necessary with a number or quantity if no actual noun phrase is
specified. For example:

Equivalent of 'of it/them', 'its'

A usage which is declining in everyday French, but which you may see
particularly in literature, is to use en as the equivalent of
"of it/them" to indicate either possession or a characteristic of something
such as its shape or colour. Thomas (1970) gives the following examples:

Ces tableaux, j'en aime les teintes délicates."These paintings, I like of them the delicate hues."="... I like their delicate hues."Ces arbes sont magnifiques et les fruits en sont excellents."These trees are splendid and the fruits of them are excellent."="... and their fruits are excellent."Suggest a change / proposez une modification

In practice, however, this construction is now rare and sounds odd to many
French speakers (not least several who have written to remind me of this fact
after reading this web site!). Instead, French would nowadays tend to use a
similar pattern to English, using son/sa/ses and leur(s) to
refer to attributes of objects as well as people. So these sentences would tend
to become: j'aime leurs teintes... and leurs fruits sont excellents.